Part 10: Which explains the care and feeding of hamsters

I now discovered that broken-up dog's chew sticks were hamster opiates. Give a hamster a chew stick and its feeble powers of thought are completely paralyzed. When I gave one a chew stick, it would run back and forth in an agony of indecision, while I egged it on: "Your brother's down at that end, meathead! Go the other way!" When they were both given chew sticks at the same, they ran in opposite directions -- one to hide under the big hut and the other in the log pile. And both seemed to think they had pulled something off.

Incidentally, although the hamsters had many possible places to hide -- what they preferred was to flatten themselves to half an inch high and squeeze under the floor of the big hut. They could be heard making crunching sound under there which caused Ted to conclude they were either lying on their sides or chewing sideways.

Mr. We-are-not-running-a-hamster-ranch, by the way, was now often to be found hunkering down next to the run holding out some tasty bits of broccoli and asking, "Who's a brave and handsome hamster?"

He was generally talking to Billy. Except that Billy was slightly larger with longer ears, the brothers were physically nearly identical. I would not go so far as to say they had personalities, but they did have traits. Ted asked, "How can you tell the difference between Billy and Baby?" "I stick my finger down there. If he bites, it's Baby."

Baby remained the most paranoid and skittish. If one of us set a hand down in the run, palm up and filled with food, Billy confidently climbed on the hand but Baby ran up and tried to bat the food off before eating it. Nothing interfered with Billy's dinners. He was what my mother would have called, "a good little eater." If I put down food in the tray and came back half an hour to find one hamster still snozzling it up like a vacuum cleaner, that was Billy. Baby had more of a sweet tooth, however, and could more often be made docile by a honey-seed treat.

I made a big mistake when I emptied the last of some dried beans into their tray. What peanut butter was to their mom, beans were to the two boys. Unfortunately, a few beans did not satisfy them because they approached the beans like a box of chocolates with too many nougat centers. They nibbled on the edges of most and then discarded them and would not touch them again. If they finished mauling a new pile of beans while I was still nearby, Baby would come up to the fence and do the Bean Dance on his hind legs until I threw down more.

In spite of not being able to remember whether I was edible, the hamsters could remember that certain sounds were associated with food coming down from heaven and they would crawl out of hiding to look for it. One was the sound of the dried food rattling down into their food tray. The other was a high voice I used to say: "Hey, pissypants, you want some dinner. Ummmp?" (The ummmp had to be delivered with a rising British professorial inflection.) They did not stir when I addressed them in my usual tones--say, when I was cleaning the run and muttering: "Filthy, disgusting beasts!"